Oakland may become rare American city with strict rules for spy gear use

OAKLAND, Calif.—A local privacy committee
has sent a proposed surveillance oversight ordinance to the city
council. This is a rare example of a major American city set to impose
stricter controls on the acquisition, use, and evaluation of spy gear.

“You are ahead of most of your peers across the country, and you are paving the way for them,” Nuala O’Connor, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group based in Washington, DC, told the assembled commission. (O’Connor was also the first chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security.)

Catherine Crump,
a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former
attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told the commission
that the ordinance it has drafted “is thorough, clear, comprehensive,
and has the potential to be adopted nationwide.”

The draft ordinance may still be subject to
minor changes before being adopted by the city council, particularly as
to how it will be enforced.

Surveillance Impact Report

Oakland’s privacy commission was created
in the wake of the controversy that bubbled up here shortly after the
Snowden revelations during the summer of 2013. Local privacy activists
and other concerned citizens caught wind of the fact that the city had formally accepted federal grant money
to build a “Domain Awareness Center” for the Port of Oakland (the
nation’s fifth-largest port) and the city itself. That plan was
eventually scaled back to exclude the city.

For years, American cities have often accepted
federal, state, or regional grant money to obtain various surveillance
equipment for their local law enforcement agencies. Lawmakers often
don’t ask questions as to how and in what circumstances such gear will
be used, neither do they typically evaluate after the fact whether those
tools have been actually effective in reducing crime.

Recently, Seattle and nearby Santa Clara County
have been cited as examples of cities that have taken a much more
skeptical view of local surveillance. They have been similarly dogged in
their questioning of police powers.

In Oakland, for example, the police
acquired cell-site simulators (commonly known as stingrays) in 2007, but
there won’t be a public policy for their use until later this year. The
new law creates a mechanism to evaluate future surveillance
technologies and to evaluate old ones through a “Surveillance Impact
Report.”

As specifically defined under the proposed law, such a report must contain a slew of information, including:

a) A description of how the surveillance
technology was used, including the quantity of data gathered or analyzed
by the technology;

b) Whether and how often data acquired through
the use of the surveillance technology was shared with outside
entities, the name of any recipient entity, the type(s) of data
disclosed, under what legal standard(s) the information was disclosed,
and the justification for the disclosure(s);

c) Where applicable, a breakdown of what
physical objects the surveillance technology software was installed
upon; for surveillance technology software, a breakdown of what data
sources the surveillance technology was applied to;

d) Where applicable, a breakdown of where the
surveillance technology was deployed geographically, by individual
census tract as defined in the relevant year by the United States Census
Bureau;

The commission is chaired by Brian Hofer,
a local soon-to-be-attorney and privacy activist. Other members include
fellow Oaklanders, representatives from the Oakland Police Department
and city administrator’s office, and Deirdre Mulligan, a law professor at UC Berkeley.

“I know everybody in this room is nervous
about the Trump administration, so this is a necessary action,” Hofer
said during the meeting.

Oakland may become rare American city with strict rules for spy gear use
Reviewed by Bizpodia
on
23:01
Rating: 5